Millions of mail pieces are sent, in transit, or delivered every day, both in the United States and around the world. As used herein, a mail piece is any item intended to be delivered to a specific recipient, and given to a delivery service of any kind for delivery. For example, and without limitation, the delivery service may be the United States Postal Service, private shipping companies, or couriers.
Many mail pieces have highly important and/or time sensitive contents. On such mail pieces, senders frequently take advantage of mail piece tracking systems, generally provided by the delivery service, so they can ensure that important mail pieces arrive on schedule, and take corrective action if they do not. Furthermore, many senders wish to immediately follow up with the recipient of a piece of mail after it arrives.
The type of corrective action or follow-up that a sender makes in response to the delivery or failed delivery of a mail piece depends on many factors, including the nature of the delivery event itself. For example, if a mail piece is rejected by an addressee, a sender may wish to immediately speak with the addressee to discuss why it was rejected.
Additionally, the sender's response to a delivery event also depends on the nature of the mail piece, and the nature of the addressee. For example, if the sender is a lender who sends a default notice to a borrower, the sender may wish to speak with the borrower immediately after the borrower receives the notice in the mail. After speaking with the recipient of the mail piece, the sender may also wish to have evidence that the conversation took place, so that the recipient cannot later claim to have been unaware of the mail piece.
However, given the volume of mail sent by many senders, it is extremely difficult for senders to intelligently respond to the delivery events associated with each mail piece. This difficulty is only magnified by variables related to the nature of the sender's relationship with the addressee and the nature of the mail piece itself.
What is needed is a way for senders to monitor the delivery status of mail pieces in a way that takes into account the nature of the mail piece and the relationship with the addressee. What is needed is a way for senders to contact addressees of mail pieces so that the sender can follow up with the addressee immediately upon the delivery (or non-delivery) of a mail piece. Finally, senders need a way to put all of this information into a single record, or multiple interconnected records, associated with the addressee. By having all of this information available, senders would have evidence of all communications with a given mail recipient, and could use the record to more effectively communicate with the addressees of their mail.